This specification relates to digital information retrieval, and particularly to processing search results relating to books.
The Internet enables access to a wide variety of content items, e.g., video or audio files, web pages for particular subjects, book articles, or news articles. A search engine can identify content items in response to a user query that includes one or more search terms or phrases, and provide links to the identified content items in the form of search results. One example search engine is the Google™ search engine provided by Google Inc. of Mountain View, Calif., U.S.A.
In some cases, user queries identify authors or books. For example, users may submit search queries including an author's name or a book title. The search engine can classify these queries as author queries or book queries, respectively. For author queries, the search engine can identify books written by the author and provide search results that link to web pages that include scanned pages of the books. For book queries for a particular book, the search engine can provide a search result that links to a web page that includes scanned pages of the particular book. The search engine can display these search results prominently above other search results generated in response to the query.
Often times, however, the query does not include exact words for titles of books or an author's name, but instead may describe a particular subject. For such queries, the user may benefit from a list of books from which the user might find useful information for the particular subject.